Daniel Stern's new book, The
Present Moment, has already generated in depth analysis and has been seen
as an intervention in the ongoing struggle in psychoanalysis regarding the
effort to eliminate remnants of Freudian positivism. I refer to Heward
Wilkinson's lengthy review essay in the Nov. 2003 issue of the International Journal of Psychotherapy (pp. 235-254). In his review, which is both highly
favorable and highly critical, Wilkinson maintains that Stern's formulations
incorporate elements of positivism and atomism that reflect the latter's
commitment to the Freud legacy in psychoanalysis. In the present review, I
describe what I take to be the most significant aspects of the contents of The
Present Moment, and assess its general character and great merit. In
addition, I explain the important role of Husserlian phenomenology in Stern's
viewpoint, which Wilkinson alludes to twice but does not address at all, except
to refer to Husserl disparagingly as one who "is also reductive in his
way…" (Wilkinson 248).

While I share with Wilkinson the
view that the future of psychoanalysis depends on fully transcending positivism,
I reject his view on how to overcome those positivist elements (which as I show
below he mistakenly attributes to Stern) while retaining Stern's
"breakthrough" (Wilkinson). Unfortunately, however, Wilkinson slights
the pervasive presence of elements of Husserlian phenomenology in Stern.
Because Wilkinson does not see the value of specifically Husserlian
phenomenology, he does not see that the antidote within Stern's thinking is an
expanded role for phenomenology rather than, as he proposes, a move towards
what I (and others) view as Heideggerean linguistic reductionism… (e.g., see
Wilkinson 253).

What, then, is "the present
moment", and what is its significance for psychoanalysis? How has Stern
been influenced by Husserl?

The present moment is understood
by Stern to be a moment of intersubjective lived experience (Stern's overriding
emphasis is on experience in the consulting room between analyst and patient).
Present moments are lived nonconsciously on the level of implicit, rather than
explicit, i.e., conscious, verbalized, or verbalizable, experience. Implicit
experience is nonconscious rather than unconscious in that it is not repressed
and is not subject to psychic resistance. (Stern's book is replete with
extensive examples and descriptions of present moments derived from the method,
fully conceptualized in the book's appendix, of "microanlysis" of
analyst-patient dialogues and patient recording of daily experiences.)

In focusing on nonconscious,
implicit experience, Stern is not rejecting the Freudian unconscious. He does
not deny either its existence or its significance for psychoanalytic
psychotherapy. Nevertheless, in one of his most revealing metatheoretical
statements, he maintains that,

The temporal aspect of the present moment…had to be
addressed…After all, the presentness of lived experience is central. This
question sent me on an extended learning journey into the realm of
phenomenological philosophy…It was there that the hidden but obvious fact that
we are psychologically and consciously alive only now became apparent…This is,
of course, a radical departure from the path historically taken by most
psychologies that put the central emphasis on the past and its influence. It
also implies that consciousness, rather than the unconscious is the key
mystery, another radical departure…xiv-xv

In thus pointing out in the Preface
to The Present Moment that consciousness rather than the unconscious is
"the key mystery," Stern might confuse readers subsequently when he
focuses, as we have seen, on nonconscious, implicit experience rather than
conscious, verbal, explicit experience. The point is, however, that
nonconscious, implicit experience is not unconscious dynamically; it is
unconscious topographically and, as such, is actually experienced; i.e., it is
conscious as a form of experience, though unreflected and nonexplicit. This is
consistent (although Stern does not at all discuss this point) with the
phenomenological notion of consciousness which is far broader and deeper than
the Freudian notion.

Most important for grasping the
nature of the present moment is understanding, as Stern points out in the quote
above, that present moments have a temporal structure. That structure is such
that they bear within them the immediate past and the foreshadowed future. In
developing his conception of the temporal structure of experience Stern was
profoundly influenced, as he fully acknowledges, by the work of Edmund Husserl,
the founder of phenomenology For Husserl, there is no "standing now".
The present, the 'now' moment, is a process with retentive (immediate past) and
protentive (anticipated future) horizons. The present moment is infused with
and structured by these flowing temporal horizons, as well as with their
experiential content. This flowing process is what Husserl referred to as
"erlebnis", a word usually translated from the German as
"lived experience." (In the phenomenological-existential perspective,
"lived experience" is referred to as "existence"). (Also,
although I cannot elaborate here, Stern fully appreciates and uses the
Husserlian notion of the intentionality of consciousness.)

Equally important for understanding
Stern's formulations is that for him the mutative effect of psychoanalysis
occurs in the therapy session in and through present moments. Oddly, Wilkinson
does not even mention, let alone discuss, the mutative effect of
psychoanalysis. Yet, understanding the mutative effect has been, and is, the
holy grail that analytic theoreticians and practitioners have sought for more
and more intensively as psychoanalysis has undergone change since Freud and has
abandoned Freud's simplistic "where id was there ego shall be"; and
in particular, as theorists have gained deeper understanding of the depth
dimension of the imbrication of positivism in psychoanalysis. For, if
psychoanalysis is not a positivist, physicalist, reductive science, and if,
therefore, the mutative effect does not have a causal structure as positivists
maintain, how does analysis bring about change in patients? As mentioned above,
Wilkinson in his review does not at all touch upon this all-important issue,
even though accounting for it is the cornerstone of Stern's perspective.

For Stern, the mutative effect
occurs through the attainment, in and through present moments, of what he calls
"intersubjective knowing".

Intersubjective knowing is
implicit and nonconscious. It occurs in the here and now, but as Stern points
out, the present moment of intersubjective knowing is quite different from
"the here and now" as presently understood in psychoanalysis. The
difference is that Stern considers the presentness of the present moment to be
absolutely crucial in constituting the mutative effect of psychoanalysis. Thus,
this effect does not come about through analytic considerations and
interventions regarding the here and now of the patient's narrative or the here
and now of the relationship between analyst and patient. Rather, the present
moment occurs in the heat atnd intensity of the intersubjective field in the
present of that heat and intensity. This is correlated with Stern's view that
the present moments in analysis that bring about change are nonconscious
(rather than unconscious) and are not matters that are subject to repression
either before, after, or during their occurrence. In fact, for Stern,
intersubjective, implicit knowing is subject, rather, to repression of any
attempt to verbalize it; in this way, its authenticity is retained and
protected from objectvation. Stern maintains that there is universally in human
beings a motivational system the aim of which is intersubjective knowing, i.e.,
implicit knowing shared by two people; and, that motivational aim is achieved
in present moments. In my view, this is the most important contribution in
Stern's book in that it comes closer to an explication of the mutative effect
of psychoanalysis than previous theories.

At this point, we can consider the
positivist elements in Stern and how they can be most constructively
transcended. For, the elements of transcendence are already implicit in the
book.

Wilkinson points to three
positivist elements in Stern's formulations: 1. Stern maintains a
"strong logical behaviorism." Wilkinson's basis for this claim: Stern
states that "We are capable of 'reading' other people's intentions and feeling
within our bodies what they are feeling [Stern's grammar MN-S]. Not in any
mystical way [Wilkinson's italics], but from watching their face,
movements, and posture, etc. etc."[I have truncated Wilkinson's quote from
Stern on Wilkinson 246]. Wilkinson maintains that Stern partially recognizes
"direct mimetic mutual resonance" and that Stern moves towards the
recognition that the social basis of mind is prior to, and the logical
presupposition of individual conscious awareness and mentality (246).

2. Wilkinson avers that Stern
maintains a very simple experience/neuro-process dualism "so that neuro-processes
are treated as functionally equivalent to personal phenomenological
processes." For Wilkinson, this dualism should point instead "towards
interactionism so thoroughgoing that it begins to relativize the position of
neuroscience from a phenomenological position" (247).

3. Wilkinson states: "Third,
and for my present purpose most important, (for this one is within the
phenomenological field and is still atomistic) there is the central
atomistic postulate of basic experiential units conceived of as
constituted in 'the present moment' by way of a 'lived story'…." (247).

Contrary to Wilkinson, it seems to
me that the second point, the claim of neuro-scientific dualism, is the most
plausible claim of positivism against Stern.

Regarding Wilkinson's first point,
that Stern fails to see that the social basis of mind is prior to individual
consciousness, this is in the first place an assumption that needs a rationale
that is not provided by Wilkinson. Secondly, many of the finest psychoanalytic
theoreticians reject the view that the 'we' is ontologically prior to the 'I';
for example, Jessica Benjamin shows in her richly argued books that
psychoanalysis, to remain psychoanalysis, must recognize both intra- and
intersubjective phenomena, where neither precedes the other. Indeed, here
psychoanalysis is homologous not with the Heideggerean insistence on the
priority of the "we" and on language as the "house of being"
and bearer of the "we'; rather, psychoanalysis is homologous with
Husserlian phenomenology which is a philosophic stance recognizes the
irreducible interplay of individual and socius where neither has priority over
the other. As Daniel Stern wrote in his (1985) The Interpersonal World of
the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985), "While intersubjective
relatedness transforms the interpersonal world, however, core-relatedness
continues. Intersubjective relatedness does not displace it; nothing ever will.
It is the existential bedrock of interpersonal relations" (125). Moreover,
core relatedness presupposes the "core self" (pp. 26-27).

Wilkinson's third point is that
Stern's conception of basic experiential units constituted in present moments
by way of lived stories is atomistic. Stern writes, however, that: "The
problem with chronos [objective time, clock time] is that if there is no
now long enough that something can unfold in it, there can be no direct
experience…Also, life-as-lived is not experienced as a continuous flow. Rather,
it is felt to be discontinuous, made up of incidents and events separated in
time but also somehow connected" (6). Thus, while on one hand Stern
maintains that "life as lived is not experienced as an inexorably continuous
flow", on the other hand he urges this against a reductive, objectified
time. Clock time flows inexorably continuously precisely because it is
objectified and as such senseless and devoid of significance. Thus also,
Wilkinson's use of objectified language, "basic experiential units"
taken out of the rich context provided by Stern is tendentious--it is itself an
objectification of Stern's view of the temporality of lived experience.

Finally, in his second point,
Wilkinson alleges that Stern posits a simple experience/neuro-process dualism.
It is indeed the case that throughout the book Stern cites and explicates
neurological correlates of the processes in the phenomenal, i.e., experiential
mind. Why does Stern do this? Certainly, that he does strongly suggests a form
of mind-brain dualism. The problem of dualism (I add) is that it threatens to
devolve, as it did in Cartesianism, into the physicalist reductionism of
scientism. Wilkinson advocates "interactionism" as an antidote to
dualism.

However, Stern's presentation of
the relevant material indicates that he is not a mind-brain dualist. Stern's Husserlian
orientation rules out dualism, for, Husserlian phenomenology is a monistic
stance such that the person is a psychophysical unity. Stern's lengthiest
excursus into neurobiological material is in Chapter Five, "The
Intersubjective Matrix" in the sub-section, "Evidence for the
Intersubjective Matrix." This sub-section is itself divided into two
sections: "Neuroscientific Evidence" and "Support from
Phenomenology." "Neuroscientific Evidence" is a lengthy
discussion of mirror neurons and their role in intersubjective experience, as
well as other recent neuroscientific findings. Stern's view of the relation
between these findings and human phenomenal experience is expressed, for
example, when, discussing his notion that there are mechanisms available for
dyadic coordination between persons, he writes that "There is another
finding that may serve as a neural correlate for intersubjectivty." The
term "correlate" does not equate with cause in the positivist sense,
nor does it necessarily imply dualism. Indeed, throughout the chapter, and the
book as a whole, Stern's discussion of these factors is embedded in discussions
of complex interactive feedback processes between neurological structures and
processes and intersubjective, phenomenal, interactive processes.

In addition, in the section on
"Support from Phenomenology," Stern discusses various aspects of
Husserlian phenomenology and references writings by Husserl scholars who have
themselves engaged the literature and findings of cognitive neuroscience, for
example the well-known and much published Husserl scholar Dan Zahavi. These
scholars and interpreters of the relation between Husserlian phenomenology and
cognitive neurosciences are attempting to bridge the gap non-dualistically and
non-reductively between the phenomenality of experience and the neurological
structuration that correlates with that phenomenality. [i]

The point that I am progressing
towards is as follows: All of these writings and discussions in the literature
on neurobiological correlates of phenomenal experience are, from a
phenomenological perspective, important and exciting, with one overriding
caveat:

In the first chapter of The
Present Moment, "The Problem of 'Now'", in presenting "a
minimal list of the features of a clinically relevant present moment",
Stern writes that the third feature is as follows: "The felt experience
of the present moment is whatever is in awareness now, during the moment being
lived [Stern's emphasis]. In discussing the problem of objectivating
present moments subsequent to experiencing them, Stern writes: "This
natural problem is why Husserl insisted that to capture phenomenal experience
and examine it for itself, we have to put a bracket (Husserl's epoche)
around it to protect it from being "explained away" at another
level" (33). This is an accurate presentation of the meaning of the epoche
or suspension of ontological commitments that is the inaugural act of
phenomenological philosophizing--it prevents a metabasis eis allo genus,
i.e., it prevents a positivist, or dualist, reduction of the phenomenal to the
naturalistic.

Given this, to make his work
internally consistent, Stern needs to make it clear that he as phenomenological
philosopher-psychoanalyst stands always within the phenomenological attitude,
the epoche. Otherwise, his excursions into neurobiology give the unfortunate
impression of being both ad hoc and defensively motivated. For this, the
antidote is not less Husserlian phenomenology, but more thoroughgoing and
consistent work within the phenomenological epoche.

[i]Naturalizing Phenomenology (1999), edited by J. Petitot, et al
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) is a recent compilation of essays
by leading scholars in the fields of phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience,
including Dan Zahavi. I have written a critique of this book, its lengthy
introductory theoretical essay in particular, that is forthcoming (along with
responses and my counter-response) in the Winter 2005 issue of the Bulletin of
the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry (AAPP).

Heward Wilkinson responds to the review above. Received October 11, 2006

I am very grateful to Dr Christian Perring for this unusual opportunity
of a creative dialogue.

Dr Nissim-Sabat used my original review article (available on my website
below) as her departure for her own review. I think she got me wrong in certain
ways; but even our disagreements are
our ways of coming to grips with a great book, one of those rare
philosophically sophisticated writings from a psychotherapist, which grips our
philosophical curiosity in a first hand way. Thus I am grateful to
Nissim-Sabat, whose review has sent me back again with renewed intensity, both
to Stern's book, and to Husserl.

I make sense of Nissim-Sabat's response to my view of Stern in terms of
her Husserlian perspective, embracing the full sense of Husserl's
phenomenological 'epoché', his reduction of (or elucidation of) the world in
terms of the transcendental ego. She believes full-bloodedly this is the way to
resolve Stern's dilemmas over psycho-physical parallelism:

'Given this,
to make his work internally consistent, Stern needs to make it clear that he as
phenomenological philosopher-psychoanalyst stands always within the
phenomenological attitude, the epoché. Otherwise, his excursions into
neurobiology give the unfortunate impression of being both ad hoc and
defensively motivated. For this, the antidote is not less Husserlian
phenomenology, but more thoroughgoing and consistent work within the
phenomenological epoché.'

In this light she
accuses me:

'Unfortunately,
however, Wilkinson slights the pervasive presence of elements of Husserlian
phenomenology in Stern. Because Wilkinson does not see the value of
specifically Husserlian phenomenology, he does not see that the antidote within
Stern's thinking is an expanded role for phenomenology rather than, as he
proposes, a move towards what I (and others) view as Heideggerean linguistic
reductionism... (e.g., see Wilkinson 253).'

I think that, whilst Stern has drawn deeply from Husserl's
intentionality and temporality analyses, he, like philosophers such as
Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Derrida, restores Husserl's
transcendentalism to a moderate realistic basis (I think, in an interactionist
form), and therefore, his version of the epoché is a descriptive suspension of
belief, not a transcendental one. It is also closer to Freud's
episodic-catastrophic concept of temporality than Husserl. At the level of the
transcendental ego, I consider Husserl never resolves the tension between his
transcendental ego-subjectivism and his transcendental inter-subjectivism, a
fault line also at the heart of psychoanalysis, (a link Nissim-Sabat makes,
though, from my perspective, uncritically).

I
find Stern's descriptive realism particularly evident in his chapter on The
Past and the Present Moment where it is clear that his intentionalism is
that (familiar in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) of the total world whole as
realized in the 'now':

'The present
remembering context is not only just one of these ongoing experiences; it is the totality of what is going on
now. It is the complete amalgam of
perceptions, sensations, cognitions, affects, feelings, and actions that are
currently acting upon us, consciously and unconsciously, implicitly and
explicitly. In this sense, past traumas, conflicts, and other basic elements of
traditional psychoanalysis that remain partially activated can be a foreground
or background part of the present remembering context.' (p198)

I believe a fault-line runs through Stern's whole book between this
comprehensive 'totality' vision, and elements of atomism, or foundationalism
(the idea that we can identify basic building blocks of experience on which all
others are founded), for instance:

'Yet, larger narratives are made of smaller ones that are embedded in them. The size of the smaller
nested life stories is not usually explored in detail. This leads to the question: Are there minimal lived stories from which
all larger narrative structures are built? I am going to answer yes, and propose that present moments are the
basis building blocks. [my italics] ('Present Moment', p58)'

The aim of my
paper was to explore the implications of that fault line, including questions
like:

whether his conception of psychotherapy as
being, in the light of the 'present moment' analysis, wider than the
past-interpretative paradigm of psychoanalysis (including existential, and
other related, approaches), which I encapsulated in my shorter title ('The
Shadow of Freud: is Daniel Stern still a psychoanalyst'), nevertheless
subscribes to an artificial antithesis between present and past, implicit
and unconscious, which I called his 'apartheid solution', or whether it
transcends it;

whether his strong element of support for
a thoroughgoing social theory of mind (I invoked the work of Julian Jaynes
here) implicitly shifts the focus away from his 'present moment'
foundationalism;

whether his 'linguistic/non-linguistic',
and 'implicit' versus 'unconscious', and other such antitheses, are
artificial in relation to the bulk of experience, and whether he himself
accepts this; and so on.

I was
conjecturing that the deepest implication of his work and fine intelligence
would pull him towards the wider-based position in each case.

Nissim-Sabat ignored much of these wider ranging questionings, in
particular my basic focus on the issues Stern raises of 'psychotherapy beyond
psychoanalysis' (potentially an integrated widening of our understanding of
psychoanalysis itself), claiming I overlooked Stern's concern with present
moments and moments of meeting as mutative factors in psychoanalysis, whereas I
simply took that as not wholly new (I don't think we fundamentally disagree in
our analysis of mutative factors!), and raised more embracing issues of the
nature of change more than once. E.g: we can
grasp that there is the most subtle play between forms of relationship
in therapeutic work (Clarkson, 2002), the transferential, the therapeutic
alliance, the I-Thou of dialogue, the developmentally corrective, the sacred or
alchemical relationship in the context of religious rite or process, in some
sense, (of which arguably the psychotherapy relationship is a low-key
instance); in the subtle interplay
of all of these the depth of process emerges in the work, and the shifts are
manifold and unfathomable. It seems
a gross narrowing of perspective to say this is either primarily
conscious (non-conscious, implicit), or primarily unconscious; both concepts have their place, but so does
that of a total communication network, in frame, partly fictitious,
partly actual or real -----, of which the overt 'present moment' relationship
is but one manifestation, and which remains comprehensively the medium of
psychodynamic effects.' (p.251)

We do disagree over Husserl, who I consider great, rightly influential,
but also mistaken, in the creative way the greatest philosophers sometimes are,
and who offers us a potently captivating transcendental will o' the wisp, on
the 'hard problem' of the relation of consciousness to neural activity, a
problem also unresolved by Stern, despite the fact that his great book provides
us important further data and clarifications from which the solution of such
problems will come.

I would like to express
my appreciation to Professors Wilkinson and Perring for fostering this
dialogue. I intend here to respond to Prof. Wilkinson's substantive critiques
of the interpretation of Daniel Stern's perspective in my review of the
latter's book, The Present Moment.

1. Prof. Wilkinson points out that I have
suggested that Stern incorporate more elements of Husserlian phenomenology into
his work, including Husserl's "transcendentalism." Wilkinson is
correct--I do advocate this as an advance for Stern. However, Wilkinson goes on
to say that, like post-Husserl phenomenologists, Stern "restores Husserl's
transcendentalism to a moderate realistic basis..., and therefore, his version
of the epoche is a descriptive suspension of belief, not a transcendental one.
" Wilkinson then goes on to say that "Stern's descriptive
realism" is evident in Chapter 12 of Stern's book, "where it is clear
that his intentionalism is that (familiar in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) of the total world whole as realized in the
'now' ;..."(Wilkinson's italics). Wilkinson then quotes from Stern to the
effect that "The present remembering context...is the complete amalgam of
perceptions, sensations, cognitions, affects, feelings and actions that are
currently acting upon us. ...etc." (my elisions, MN-S),

Wilkinson's account here seemingly expresses
the distinction he makes between transcendentalism (Husserl) and descriptive
realism (Stern). That is, descriptive realism is the view that the present
moment is the "totality of what is going on now", whereas
transcendentalism is the view that the phenomenological suspension of ontological
commitments, i.e., the transcendental phenomenological epoche, rules out an
intentionality that is directed toward the "total world whole."

It seems to me that students of Husserlian
phenomenology would find Wilkinson's version of it to be extremely baffling.
Specifically, the quote that Wilkinson cites as evidence of Stern's
non-Husserlian descriptive realism is entirely consistent with what Husserl
elaborated in his Cartesian Meditations
and The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology as genetic phenomenology. It is true that in
his early work Husserl spoke of descriptive phenomenology, which, in contrast
to genetic phenomenology, Husserl later spoke of as "static"
phenomenology. But it was precisely in the period in which Husserl most fully elaborated
transcendental phenomenology that he developed genetic phenomenology. For
Husserl, all experience is both present experience (never construed by Husserl
or Stern as a nunc stans or standing
now) of the sedimented layers of encounter with inner and outer
"objects", i.e., perceptions, sensations, affects, feelings, and so
on. Moreover, "the total world whole" of which Wilkinson speaks can
only come into view from a transcendental perspective--i.e., a perspective like
that presented by Thomas Nagel in his
famous book The View from Nowhere, a
book in which Nagel fails to acknowledge his debt to Husserl.

2. Prof. Wilkinson then presents his critique
of Stern, a critique that would show Stern to be far a field from any
phenomenological perspective and at the same time far a field from any
psychoanalytic perspective. Wilkinson, (and here I believe that Wilkinson's
Heideggerean perspective shows through again) maintains that Stern
"subscribes to an artificial antithesis between present and past, implicit
and unconscious..." Wilkinson says
that Stern has a "fault line" between his "totality vision"
and elements of atomism or foundationalism. He quotes Stern to the effect that
present moments are "minimal lived stories from which all larger narrative
structures and built" and that "present moments are the basic
building blocks" (p. 58). For Wilkinson, this claim by Stern is atomistic
and therefore foundationalist.

Pertinent to this aspect of Wilkinson's
critique of Stern is the question of whether or not Wilkinson construes
psychoanalysis as a theory and practice of developmental processes in human
experience. When Heidegger elaborated his notion of ready-to-handedness (zuhandenheit), he provided no notion
whatsoever as to the psychosocial process in and through which a tool, for
example, becomes ready-to-hand, i.e., not an objectified object, but an
extension of the carpenter's body. Indeed, Heidegger's perspective does not
provide any ground whatsoever for a developmental psychology, or even one that
would account in some way for the actuality of human psychic development. Thus,
what Wilkinson refers to as "atomistic" and "foundationalist' in
Stern's theory flows from Stern's concern, in all of his work, for providing a
meaningful account of the phenomenon of human development. To suggest that
Stern's views are "atomistic" because Stern sees that "present
moments", which are experiential phenomena that occur from the inception
of human existence, and are shot through with temporal flow, are the medium of
all developmental processes--to refer to this view as "atomistic" is
simply egregious. Atomism is relevant to scientistic empiricist perspectives--a
far cry from Stern's phenomenology of human psychosocial, developmental
processes. Moreover, the fact that Wilkinson links atomism and foundationalism
is egregious as well. The term "foundationalism" is used in
contemporary postmodern philosophy as a term of negative critique generally
applied to philosophies that include an a priori dimension of subjectivity or existence,
i.e., like Husserlian phenomenology. However, atomism is a term that is
generally used in empiricist perspectives that deny any a priori dimension
Thus, Wilkinson's linkage of the terms is again baffling. Does he mean to
suggest that any view that includes differentiations amongst its components is
"foundationalist" in the negative critical sense? Are we then,
Heidegger like, to just await the advent of Being? Or, as in Stern's
developmental psychoanalysis and Husserl's philosophy of development, can we
gain insight and wisdom regarding human development that would enable us to
facilitate our own growth and maturation? I think that Stern would opt for the
latter.

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